By Julian Benbow Globe Staff

Sixty-one years is a long time to wait, but patience had never been one of Frank Spaziani’s issues.

He spent eight years at the University of Virginia under George Welsh, an unfathomable lifespan at a time when college coaches have the life expectancy of an insect.

Every so often, reporters would wonder about Spaziani and the coaches on Welsh’s staff.

“It’s kind of a philosophical thing,” Spaziani said. “Everybody has different ways they go about things, grow into stuff.’’

Reporters at Virginia would ask him, “Why are you guys still with George Welsh? Don’t you have any ambition?”

He could have taken it as an insult. It wasn’t like he didn’t have a good thing going with Welsh. They went to four bowl games at Virginia on top of the three they reached with Navy.

But the matter was more philosophical for Spaziani, “a Nietzsche thing,” he calls it. He could look around the country and point to schools, be it Penn State or Virginia Tech, where staffs had been together for decades.

“Staffs stay together, it’s a value thing,” he said. “Some of them had opportunities and balanced and weighed things out. The grass is always greener. If that’s what you want to do, and that’s what you need to fulfill yourself, then that’s how you have to think. But you can fulfill yourself other ways, too. That doesn’t mean anything more than that.

“What’s it worth to uproot your family? Where’s the balance to it? Are you willing to take that chance, not take it? Somebody will look at it and say you don’t have ambition. Somebody will say you have reckless ambition.”

Nothing about Spaziani has ever been reckless. He is loose and casual, but still measured with an even temperament. Above all else though, he was loyal.